A sensation on British television every bit as dramatic and popular as Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife is based on this gripping memoir by former midwife Jennifer Worth, "at once hilarious and tremendously moving" (Ayelet Waldman). In the 1950s, at the age of 22, Worth left her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in the slums of London's East End. The colorful characters she meets while delivering babies—from the resourceful, warmhearted nuns with whom she lives to the mother with two dozen children, and the prostitutes and dockworkers of the city's seedier side—animate this portrait of hope in a most desperate place.